Curley's Story of the Battle, #3
"What I am going to tell is just short. I don't know much about it, but I will tell you all I know. I was never where most of the soldiers were; I was always with Custer's outfit. I knew the Chief with the long whiskers and I knew Custer's brother. I also knew the one who called the bugle. "We met the camp before ten o'clock in the morning. Just before we got to the camp there was one band went one way and the other band went the other way. I don't know anything about the other band because they were away across the river. "On my side I have told you all I know. The bugler got killed in the camp. Some of them got killed in the river. They (the Sioux) would not let the soldiers cross the river. There were too many of the Sioux. The soldiers got down to the ground by the river but could not get across, so turned and ran back up the hill. The soldiers did not know much about fighting. Those white people know more about fighting than the soldiers did. All the soldiers were killed before ten o'clock. "Just before they got all the soldiers killed, and there were just a few of them left, my horse was a pretty good runner and he ran off. I was just a young fellow and Custer told me to run off and I did run off. I was only sixteen or seventeen and didn't know much about fighting at that time. If I had been older when they had the war I might have done something and if I had been older I wouldn't have run off; I would have stayed there and got killed. I had to run away. They did not chase me. I went east of the Agency, where the big pines are, and stayed there. After I got off the high hill I rode to where the steamboat was. I brought the letter over to where they had the fight; brought it from the big chief back to where they had the war." The Custer Battle Book by Herbert Coffeen, A Reflection Book, Carlton Press, Inc., New York, 1964 p 50
Nineteen year-old Crow scout Curley was one of 40-plus Crow, Arikara, Sioux and half-breed scouts who accompanied Custer to the Little Bighorn. He achieved wide notoriety among white Americans for flagging down the river boat Far West at the mouth of the Little Bighorn River on June 28, 1876 with the first report of Custer's annihilation. Among Native Americans, however, he was sometimes regarded as a headline grabber (e.g., White Man Runs Him) and a coward (e.g., Gall). Curley told his story many times, and for a century and a half he has been a source of confusion near the center of the mystery of what one of the great Little Bighorn mysteries -- what happened to Custer personally. Curley was evasive and vague all the rest of his life about what he was doing at the river when saw Custer's attack falter at Medicine Tail Coulee, but the eye-witness journal of Peter Thompson may provide the answer. Just before Custer's attack, Thompson saw a Crow scout at the river with a Sioux squaw on a tether. Curley could be Crow scout Thompson caught in the middle of an apparent war crime, but it could also be one of the other Crow scouts -- Hairy Mocassin, White Man Runs Him and Goes Ahead -- since Goes Ahead said the three of them went together to the river at exactly the moment Thompson said he saw the Crow Scout with a roped squaw. Like the Arikara scouts at the outset of Reno's charge a half hour before, at least one of the Crow scouts with Custer was looking for a little rape and/or murder action among the Sioux and Cheyenne women at the outset of Custer's charge. See Who Killed Custer -- The Eye-Witness Answer for more info on what happened at Medcine Tail Coulee. * * * Curley's first account of the battle also contributed one of the indelible descriptions of the battle to the literature of the Little Bighorn: "Curley says the firing was more rapid than anything he had ever conceived of, being a continuous roll, like (as he expressed it), * * * Here are 1876 and 1938 accounts of the battle by Curley. For more information on Custer's scouts, please see The Twisted Saga of the Unsung Seventh Cavalry Scouts. -- Bruce Brown
According to the eye-witness record, this is the way it really happened...
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CURLEY'S STATEMENT
